Lightweigth forwarder upgrade

[cafissimo]

Hello, I am going to upgrade splunk light forwarder to splunk universal forwarder. In the splunk documentation I'have found some steps to follow. In particular I should (as written in "http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/latest/Deploy/Migrateanixforwarder") as mentioned at step 3: "3. In the universal forwarder's installation directory, $SPLUNK_HOME, create a file named old_splunk.seed; in other words: $SPLUNK_HOME/old_splunk.seed. This file must contain a single line, consisting of the path of the old forwarder's $SPLUNK_HOME directory. For example: /opt/splunk. " Does it mean that the universal forwarder has to be installed in a different directory than /opt/splunk if the light forwarder is installed in /opt/splunk? Thanks and kind regards, Luca Caldiero, Consoft Sistemi S.p.A.

[Steve_G_ · Accepted solution]

You cannot actually upgrade from the light forwarder to the universal forwarder, but you can migrate your light forwarder settings to the universal forwarder. This is an important distinction.

Unlike the light forwarder, the universal forwarder is an entirely separate download and executable from full Splunk. Do not install it over an existing installation of full Splunk (including light forwarder or heavy forwarder).

[Branden]

Yes, you should install the Universal Forwarder in a different directory than the SplunkLightForwarder.

The instructions confused me at first too. I always installed the SplunkLightForwarder in /splunk, but then I noticed that the UniversalForwarder tarball extracts to /splunkforwarder, so that's where I installed it. (That's how it worked on AIX anyway.) Worked great.

Hope that helps!